Quick & Dirty: Movie Reviews

Simulataneously looks much more expensive than the TV series, and still very, very cheap (which is a good thing). I wish they'd done more than just made an episode of the series with a few awkwardly-inserted T

I enjoyed this movie immensely. The first half is kind of a comedic free-fall, jumping from hilarious scenes of a fictional film adaptation of the 18th century novel, to a portrayal of the filming of those scenes, to a behind-the-scenes dramedy about the actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, playing versions of themselves. Confusing? Yes, but funny as hell, too. The second half settles down behind the scenes of the production, but repeatedly drifts away from the movie and the book, only to occasionally veer back into them. Which, I gather, is how the book works (I read the first hundred or so pages once when I was doing my BA, and gave up). In the hands of lesser talents, this approach could be insufferably pretentious, but whatever you might think of writer/director Michael Winterbottom, he's not a lesser talent.

This movie amazes me every time I see it. It's not only a devastating critique of the whole Western mythos, but a meditation on violence, morality and filmmaking. After seeing this movie, it's pretty hard to ever again take seriously any movie about the righteous good-guy bloodlessly blowing away a bunch of bad men.

How good is George Clooney in this movie? Well, he plays an ultra-successful professional hatchet man who's just looking for someone who can look past his extraordinary wealth, status and good looks to accept him for the borderline-sociopathic asshole he is -- and he's still totally sympathetic. Dammit.

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Valhalla Rising (2009)
3.5/5

2011-01-02 12:29

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Vanishing Point (1971)
4/5

2009-03-15 21:50

It's kind of hard to talk about this movie without comparing it to it's arty, existential road-movie doppelganger, Two-Lane Blacktop. So I will do just that, and say that TLB does the existentialism better, but this one has a lot more action. They're both great movies, but this isn't the one that sticks with me.

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Volver (2006)
4/5

2009-06-06 20:34

In this campy (but heartfelt) melodrama of well-meaning mother-daughter murder teams and ghosts working as assistant hairdressers, the thing I found most implausible is that someone that looks like Penelope Cruz could ever be dirt poor or single. But that's probably missing the point. I've come to the conclusion that I probably lack the sensitivity to ever fully get caught up in Pedro Almodovar's stories of romantic Spanish poverty, but I'm enough of a film geek to totally enjoy his best work, such as this.

En route to Alaska, a nearly-destitute Michelle Williams has her car break down in small-town Oregon, and then loses her dog. There are no quirky townspeople or saccharine melodrama or grand statements, just one person in one place in one situation, but the story is so well-told, I was completely engrossed from the opening scene to the credits.

Crispin Glover plays a weirdo. Surprise! Though as always, he does it really, really well. This time, he befriends, controls and is betrayed by an army of intelligent, cat-eating rats. There's a tacked-on human love interest, but the real relationship is Glover and his rats.

This character study/detective film is so clever and so thoroughly enjoyable, it should really be better known. It has a twisty film noir plot, great location shooting in Portland, Oregon, and Ben Stiller back when he could be funny without making the veins in his forehead pop out from the effort. But the real reason to see it is Bill Pullman as Daryl Zero, kind of a mixture of Sherlock Holmes and Howard Hughes: superemely confident as a detective, but so socially inept that he refuses to ever meet clients and locks himself in his apartment living on diet of tuna, Tab and amphetemines. Pullman gives Zero a social ineptness that starts out hilarious and then slowly adds levels of pain and poignancy as his latest case pulls him further and further out of his safety zone.

A painstakingly detailed masterpiece about the painstaking detailed assembly of a murder case. This is truly a film that lives up to its own obsessive inspiration -- the true story of the tracking of the Zodiac serial killer by professional and amateur sleuths. I've admired David Fincher ever since Seven, but here he puts the flashy tricks away and sets himself up as heir to Hitchcock.